Friday, November 27, 2009

Water Troubles

Water. We drink it. We bathe with it. We use it constantly in every part of our lives. And now I live in the desert, where water is a precious, precious commodity.

Unlike in America, where water appears magically in our houses via pipes, the water in Jordan is delivered to each apartment every week. The complexes all have water tanks on the roofs that are filled up once a week. That is all the water you get for the entire week unless you pay more money.

Once in Daheit al Rasheed, we ran out of water. We don’t know how, but we speculated that it involved a leak because we had never before nor after used up our entire tank. We spent the remaining two days of our week with no water. It was unpleasant.

Since moving in to our new place, we’ve had even more water trouble. We moved in on Monday and found out Tuesday morning that our water heater wasn’t working. No hot water. On Wednesday night, a repair man came over and fixed it. We were fine until Saturday morning when we ran out of water completely. Apparently, no one had opened up our tank so that we got our share of the delivered water, so we had been using up whatever was left from the people before us.

As we had a dinner the next day, we ran around all afternoon trying to remedy the situation. A guy came over and ran a line from another empty apartment’s tank into ours so we could steal their water. Our tank was refilled for real on Wednesday, so we are back on the water circuit.

This time, we made it five days without a problem. Yesterday, Heather was doing a load of clothes and found out that the entire socket that the washing machine and the water heater is plugged into isn’t working. So once again, we have no hot water. Even better, it’s Eid right now, so we probably won’t be able to get it fixed until after the holidays because, again, the entire country basically stops for Eid.

Normally, we could run over and take showers at Lena’s house, which is only a seven-minute walk. That indeed was our plan until last night, when Lena told us that her apartment was out of water as well. They had gone through their entire tank in a day and a half. Somebody has a leak.

The three of us might be a tiny bit smelly by the end of Eid. Methinks it might be time to hit the Turkish baths.

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About Me

My name is Gretchen Marie, fledgling writer, avid editor, technology lover and traveler extraordinaire. I love reading more than could possibly be healthy, singing and dancing pretty much anytime and being a total nerd when it comes to television shows. I've also been told I love animals more than anyone on the planet. But my real passion is flying off to parts unknown. I lived in France, traveled extensively in Europe, took a trip to the Land Down Under for a journalism workshop and spent two months in China reporting for the Olympics. I'm off yet again, this time to Amman, Jordan. These are my stories.